The Bitter Aftertaste
by Melindia
Summary: Monica Wilkins is a forty-eight-year-old woman who enjoys sweets and the Australian sunshine. She should have recognised the rotten core, given her real profession. Oneshot.


Monica Wilkins beamed as she dug her finger into the tube of sherbet. Lemon was her all-time favourite. Perhaps she was eating a bit too much of it-God knows what it was doing to her teeth-but she didn't care one jot. It was scrumptious, and you only lived once, after all. Might as well indulge before she was pushing up the daisies.

"Another one, love?" Wendell grinned at her, and her own smile widened.

The Australian sunshine beat down strongly, trying to worm its way through her factor 50 sun block. It was succeeding, going by the way she could feel her shoulders practically steaming from the heat. It was like being the lobster in the boiling pot down under. But in a pleasant way. With the sunlight bathing everything in gold, Monica felt a decade younger.

"We should've done this years ago," she said, putting the sherbet down so she could squeeze her husband's hand without getting powder all over the patio. There was no need to explain what she was referring to. "I mean, what on Earth was keeping us?"

"Our jobs? Our rather terrible finances? My crippling fear of koalas?" Wendell joked.

"Oh, ha, you comedian, you," she said. "Seriously, though: no family ties, no kids to worry about getting a melanoma. It was perfect."

Wendell had got a wistful look to his face, but didn't say anything, content to watch the sun slowly cross the sky while his wife tucked into her sherbet on the lawn chair beside him.

Perfect didn't last.

A plain woman with frizzy brown hair appeared in front of them. Literally, appeared. Out of thin air. Was she going crazy? A quick glance at Wendell confirmed that if that was the case then at least it was folie à deux. His eyes were almost comically wide.

The woman walked closer. Her eyes were dark and closed off. Monica noticed a thin scar stretching across her neck. "Mum," she whispered. "Dad."  
Monica was scared. Daughter? She had no daughter. She'd dropped out of dental school and became a reasonably successful author, getting married in her late thirties to Wendell, who had been an art student turned carpenter. There had never been any room for a child. This woman was obviously off her rocker, and possibly dangerous.

Jutting her chin out determinedly, she stated, "I'm sorry, you must be mistaken. I don't have a daughter." The woman laughed, a broken sound that rattled in her larynx.

"I'm so sorry, Mum."

And the last thing Monica Wilkins saw was the woman brandishing a stick and a strange white vapour.

Powdered tableaux of a tiny girl with wild brown curls on the swings, getting full marks in a primary school numeracy test, flicking a twig-wand-and producing an implausible flock of canaries. Gasping in shock and adjusting her face to a proud smile when her daughter turns to her, arms outstretched. Going to dental school. A letter carried by an owl. Her daughter spending summers at home penning letters to the other world with a wistful sigh.

The sour fizz of memory. Bubbling like lemon sherbet spilled in cola.

Doctor Granger loathed sherbet.

It rotted teeth.

So many tots with far too many cavities had come into their shared dental practice, anxiously glancing at their parents' guilt-ridden faces as they fidgeted on leatherette chairs in the waiting room. And she hadn't said it, but always thought: "It's your fault your child is going through this."  
Her daughter's face right now was a shamed facsimile of those sugar-fiend mothers and fathers as she hunched on the stool across from them. One robbing their children of their tooth enamel, the other robbing her parents of their minds.

She wasn't sure which was worse.

"Mum, Dad, I am so sorry," Hermione said, tears tracking down her freckled cheeks. "I had to, you remember Voldemort, you were in danger-"

"Why didn't you ask us, Hermione?" says her husband whose name is not Wendell Wilkins. "We would have went into hiding if it were dangerous. I . . . " He broke off, forehead wrinkled and adding a decade to him. "We're not children, Hermione. We can choose."

And as Hermione launched into another long-winded explanation, by which she meant excuse, not-Monica Wilkins stared at the tube of sherbet in her sunburnt hands, crumpled it, and tossed it away.


End file.
